Bird Watching Read Free Page B

Scottie Wedman going against me for a number of years, pushing me every day. To the second unit, those practices were their games, especially to a guy like Kite who didn’t play much. He wanted to beat us every day in practice. He never took a day off. He couldn’t afford to. He was excellent for our team. He was a smart player, he knew everything we were doing, and he understood exactly what his role was. I wish I could find me a Greg Kite right now for the Pacers.
    After that 1986 championship, everything fell apart. Walton stuck around another season, but he was hurt almost all of it, and he retired after playing only ten games in 1987. The Celtics drafted Len Bias that spring, and he died of a cocaine overdose. That was a real shock. I was taking a shower, and my mom came in and told me. I thought it was somebody’s idea of a cruel joke. Then Kevin hurt his foot the next season, and by the time we got to the Finals against the Lakers, he was playing on a broken foot. It just seemed like we couldn’t catch a break.
    Just before the 1988–89 season, both of my heels started really bothering me. This wasn’t a new injury. I had always had some pain down there. Dan said it didn’t help matters that I never stretched those Achilles tendons. He also said there had been some inflammation in that area for some time. But what took this pain to an unbearable level was that, over time, with repeated trauma to that area, I developed bone mass in both heels. There shouldn’t be any bone anywhere near there, and it was embedded in the tendon. I tried to play through it, but it wasn’t going to happen, so they decided to do surgery on both heels and take all that bone out. Dan was against the surgery. He thought he could treat me without it, but I wanted the pain to stop. I told him, “Let’s just get the stuff out of there and worry about the rest of it later.” Originally the doctors said I would miss about three months, but I ended up missing the whole season. I was miserable. It’s no fun watching your team struggle while you’re sitting there on the bench in street clothes.
    When I started my rehab that summer I knew I would never be the same. My legs felt different. The surgery took all the life out of them. I did all the exercises and all the workouts they gave me, but I couldn’t move the way I used to. I could still score and rebound and all that, but defensively it really affected me. I didn’t have the same lift, or side-to-side movement. It was very, very frustrating, but there wasn’t much use in talking about it. I could either play on or give it up, and I figured I had a lot more playing to do.
    Of course, that was before I had any real idea of how bad my back would get. I guess I should have known. The doctors had told me I had congenital problems. I was born with a narrower canal than normal where the nerves lead to the spinal cord. Then there are the joints in my back, called the facet joints. They are supposed to be aligned a certain way. The left and right joints should be parallel to each other, but the ones on my right side were at all sorts of different angles. What all of this meant was my disc was going to slowly break down over the course of my life. Dan says I would have had back problems whether I was a professional athlete or not. Just through the wear and tear of every day, my spinal area was deteriorating, and the disc was degenerating. And the worse that disc got, the more excessive motion it caused in my back. That created a wobbly area that had very little stability.
    All of that may have been true, but when you are a kid running around playing basketball and baseball and everything else, you don’t want to know that stuff. I didn’t have any major injuries as a kid growing up, unless you count a broken ankle that I got playing basketball. I had no way of knowing my back was going to give out on me.
    My first real back problems cropped up in 1983, when I went home to my house in French